A devil of a fellow, and The yellow cat

He had always been spoiled, by men, and especially by women. Even in the name they called him in Portuguese Old Harbor, down cape, there was a ring of irrepressible triumph--“Va Di! Va Di!”--as it were, “a devil of a fellow,” or “a gay bird.”

They had been dead for more than half a year, he and Stiff Peter--dead, that is, in the knowledge of the home world. And as befitting one out of the unknown, he returned more magnificent than ever, stepping down the fruit steamer’s plank at the Boston dock dressed in a suit of cream-colored flannels gotten in the tropics, between which and the pale block of the Panama hat above, his face showed more than ever swarthy, rich-toned, and clean-drawn, with its crisp black spurs of mustache breaking the line of either cheek, like a brigand on a poster. In his right hand he poised a slender cane, something he had learned in Port au Prince. Stiff Peter came behind, carrying the new straw suitcase, clothed himself in much the same sort of shoddy in which he and his captain had been picked up from the fisherman’s wreckage, seven months before, by a southward-going tramp. Stiff Peter was a small fellow; he had to look up to Va Di; had he had to look down to Va Di the world would have been quite inexplicable.

The pair stood outside the dock gates, staring about them at the heavy summer city, the venders of colored fruits, the hot blue Elevated trains thundering overhead, the ice-carts sweating long, cold threads across the cobbles.

“Here’s the country fer you, eh, Peter?”

Peter nodded, showing his bad teeth. “Betcha!”

The master pointed the tips of his mustache and smiled easily at a passing shop-girl. “Say, Peter, I a’most wisht now I didn’t send that letter home. Be some sport, now, coming ashore into Old Harbor, like a--miracle.”

“Betcha!” The little fellow grinned, thinking that would have been fine. “I wisht you didn’t, either,” he echoed. The fact that Peter himself had sent the letter, Va Di never having learned to read or write, did not obtrude itself upon either of them. Peter waited patiently, eyes on the cobbles.

“Well, Peter, we’ll see a night afore we go down home, anyhow. Wonder who’ll be to Schlinsky’s? Them boys off the fleet’ll be tickled to see me.”

“Betcha!”

Outside Schlinsky’s place they were confronted by a slovenly jointed man whose little, red-rimmed eyes seemed to be looking at ghosts.

“Thousand devils!” the fellow gasped in his long throat.

Va Di straightened the left lapel of his coat and flicked a damp curl from his forehead. No one enjoyed this sort of thing more than he.

“Hello, Costa! How’s fishin’--good? Any the boys done good this year?”

“But for Gawd’s s-a-k-e!” Costa stretched out an absurdly long finger to touch the flannel stuff. “And is that Stiff Peter?” His eyes wabbled about in a grotesque fashion. “Say, you fellahs is drowned!”

He closed his eyes tight and mopped the sweat from his brow with the back of a wrist. “I was onto the Arbitrator myself las’ fall when she picked up your wreckage. Me and Tony Silva catched a dory-load o’ corpses ourselves. The hull o’ you’s got good granite stones up to the graveyard. And here you come tackin’ up to me in broad daylight.” He popped his eyes very suddenly at the conclusion, as if to give nature a chance.

“And you never knowed?” Va Di demanded, losing his dramatic composure.

“Knowed what?”

“Knowed we was picked up, me and Peter, and took to Brazil.”

Costa shook his head uneasily, still a little suspicious of them.

“But looky here, didn’t--Who was it I sent that letter to, Peter? Mamie Cabral? Say, man, didn’t Mamie get no letter offa me? Eh?”

“N-n-naw.” Costa’s face changed abruptly from pale brown to brick color and his unmanageable fingers fussed with his beard. “Mamie’s went--”

“_Went?_ Went where?”

“Nowheres. Only she went an’ got married.”

“Got married?”

“Got married.”

“Onto who?”

“Onto that old storekeep, Henny Lake--you know.”

“Old Henny Lake with the crooked leg? Looky here, Costa--”

Costa backed away a step, licked his lips, fumbled uneasily in and out of his pockets, and after a moment spoke in a voice unnecessarily loud:

“Come on up an’ have a drink, Va Di, old fellah.” He slapped the other on the back crying: “There’s other fish into the water, man!”

“You go straight to hell!”

Va Di stood for a long time after Costa had retreated up the stairway, scowling into the yellow sun of evening, his teeth playing with his nether lips, his hands tormenting the frail Malacca.

“They--they’s other fish into the water,” Peter stammered, desperate to shift the great man’s humor. Va Di wheeled with out-flung hands.

“Other fish! Well, I guesso. Mary Virgin! but I got a dozen girls in town, right here, better ’n that run-around slut that jumps after an old man’s money the minute I get out o’ sight. Fish? I guesso! Come on up, Stiff Peter. I’ll show ’em.”

He mounted the dusty stairs, with Peter sweating after him, and in the wide, many-tabled hall of the Jew, heavy with the arid lushness of a summer night in the city, he drank himself into a heroic insensibility, so that he had to be carried away to dark T Wharf, in the willing hands of the fish fleet, and dumped aboard a schooner bound down on the morning tide for the end of the Cape.

They opened the town around Long Point, a straggling arc of infinitesimal houses and wharves and spires, all colored alike in the sulphur fires of sunset, with here and there a gleam of clear flame refracted from a windowpane, a whole broadside from the cold-storage in the western sands.

“Seven month,” Peter mused, an eye cornerwise on the silent man beside him in the bows. “Seven month; and it’s like yiste’day--er mebby ten, twenty year, lookin’ at it another way, eh, Cap’n?”

“They’ll be took aback,” Va Di muttered, rousing himself from his sour preoccupation. “I’m goin’ to see the Silvado girls tonight, Peter. You watch their faces, now. Fish into the water--I guesso.” He fell into another silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the cutwater and the tiny crescendo of men’s voices as the bow gang straggled forward to make the anchor ready. The fleet at mooring drifted nearer, spiring purple on a mat of pellucid gold.

“I see Maya’s shifted his offshore trap,” Peter struggled patiently.

The tide was low when the dories came ashore, leaving a wide stretch of flats, soggy, half-reflecting. Two of the crew, to tell of it afterward, carried Va Di on their shoulders and saved his white shoes from the wet, their own boots leaving tiny lakes behind, full of yellow sky. A bare-legged girl with a clam-rake in her hand turned curiously as she crossed in front of them, opened her eyes wider, ran away blushing richly, the damp skirts flinging about her knees.